I have threatened to go on about ideas before. Well, here we are.
In this two parter I will explore some of the explanatory power of myth.
We think of myth as something to do with the past, but myths are created all the time. The reason myth persists is because its power to explain the world appeals to a deeply personal set of instincts and feelings and desires.
In this first part I go on about the pact with the Devil as imagined in the Faust myth. After going on about the nature of the modern self, I mention Marlowe, Goethe and the regrettable Thomas Mann.
In the second part I will return to the covid era and argue that the same diabolical appeal of the Devil’s bargain explains the support of lockdowns and “vaccines”, which fostered so much hate in the service of evil.
Note: I will follow up with the realism interview, which I have yet to get approved. Also will do more on ideas such as
Neoplatonism
Jungianism
and other Gnostic influences in the New Year.
For now it is Duplo and making castles out of the sofa cushions for me.
Pacts with the Devil
THE pact with the Devil is as old as sin. With modern times come modern means, and the means in the minds of the men who would play God is technology.
A bargain basement mentality sits well with the notion that life might be a game to be won. If only played with cunning, says the quiet whisper, we might have it all.
Yet life is not a set of rules to be gamed. It is only to those who see no reason to deny themselves their utmost desires that life appears to be an open question of how to get what I want.
We live in a time when men believe once more that their designs in words and in machines have the power to make them divine.
God has been explained away, they say, and His power is now ours due to crafty innovation.
Of course, such tools as science has produced can be used for evil or for good. It is the danger of our age that even good and evil are discarded as a handicap to the visionaries of the technological utopia.
New sin for the old ceremony
The promise of the Enlightenment is the removal of restraint. With Reason supreme, everything deemed to limit Man is to be removed in the act of his emancipation.
He is the means of his own salvation. Through his machinations, he will make himself a God.
The bargain of liberation is a fool’s bargain.It is a Faustian pact, delivering debauch and exhaustion of desire for a price.
The price seems paltry to the soulless. Soulless in the sense of being incapable of sensing it, the man with no regard for his soul sees no reason why he should not trade it for his desires.
Something and Nothing
In the absence of God, or rather, where we abandon Him, there is nothing to restrain us.
There is nothing behind the image to which we turn, ourselves, the axle of our brave new world. It is like a photograph tacked over a hole in the wall, this self independent of so called superstition, which at first glance seems a natural part of the scenery of life.
On closer examination there is nothing behind the image but a void.
This is the nature of being in nothingness.
When everything is nothing, there is only the present. There is nothing to aim for, nothing to avoid - except on the basis of preference.
The whims of the immediate are governed by the gusts of desire.
When the internal is externalised, as in the principle of the projection of desire as political and personal realisation, there is nothing left inside. It is all on - and about -the surface.
The image is the coin of the realm, a kingdom of appearances, where deeds are secondary to descriptions, and anything foul can be made fine with a phrase.
In this life the self itself is a euphemism - a symbol contrived to make inoffensive something untoward. A thing we would rather not mention is framed in a manner which makes the picture itself invisible. It is a persona - a disguise for the person inside.
Much effort is maintained to pass without notice, concealed in make-up. The desire to pass as trans-virtuous is what motivates the adoption of a publicly approved personality.
The result of this meretricious deception is to reduce humanity to a smear, like wet ink brushed by a careless sleeve. It makes all appear the same, applying mass produced concealer over the blemishes we prefer to hide than acknowledge - or correct.
The paradox of Self
With each a star in their own sky, the world is constellated not with variety but with sameness. It is the equality of the empty, a blankness punctuated by the brand names of bags and cars and shoes.
There is no content to this creation. It is all surface and little substance. What is substantial in man is sacrificed to maintain this illusion of a person that never really was.
Subtract the things and see how much of a man remains. There is little we truly own that cannot be taken away. Such is the poverty of affluence.
The pact of Faust
MEPHASTOPHILIS: Why this is hell, nor am I out of it. Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God, And tasted the eternal joys of heaven, Am not tormented with ten thousand hells In being deprived of everlasting bliss? O Faustus, leave these frivolous demands, Which strike a terror to my fainting soul. FAUSTUS: What, is great Mephastophilis so passionate For being deprivèd of the joys of heaven? Learn thou of Faustus' manly fortitude, And scorn those joys thou never shalt possess.
Faust - meaning “fist” in German - is the name we have for a mythic vehicle of desire at the cost of damnation. There is said to have been at least one historical Faust.
The name betokens a fable whose moral is appropriate to our times. Dr Faustus - as Christopher Marlowe called him in his 1616 Tragicall History, is a man who desires to be and to have much more. He seeks to magnify himself.
He makes a bargain with the agent of Satan, Mephistopheles - who is careful to inform Faustus of the price - and with whom he is ultimately dealing. He is to sell his soul and be damned.
Faustus cares not for an eternity in flames nor for its master. To him the power of Satan is not a trap but an escape.
He decides to emancipate himself - by means which condemn him forever.
The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann’s 1924 book Der Zauberberg (“The Magic Mountain”) was the inspiration for the meeting place of the World Economic Forum at Davos.
Since the rites of Eleusis the theme of purity and pollution has compassed the world in words. The sickness and health of the world of men is the theme of The Magic Mountain, which takes place in a sanatorium on top of a Swiss mountain.
Whilst the patients - not quite “inmates” - view the world and its confusion from the pure atmosphere of their lofty remove, the book’s elevated caste experiment with passions and ideas, being forever incapable of choosing between two worlds.
Like Buridan’s Ass, which starved to death for being incapable of deciding which of two heaps of hay to eat, everyone in Mann’s stories suffers some terrible loss or death at the end of a paralysing indecision.
The Consumer Cosmos
To the Modernist, life is a cafeteria over whose fateful choices one must demur for years.
In The Magic Mountain, love is indistinguishable from sickness. This motif is a token of the moral value of the literature of this type.
Modernism here and more broadly made high drama out of the whimsy of inner life, rendering romantic passion at once casual and tragically heroic. Life is like a light struck through a cut glass whisky tumbler, where any-angled rays may spark in evanescent hues. All it takes is another slight turn.
Sometimes the glass itself is shattered, freezing these parlour fireworks in the memory alone. To the Modernist, pleasure and pain are the same and evermore exquisite for the fact that we die. This makes the joys and woes the envy of the Olympian gods.
It is to be remembered that Zeus, who envied men for this result of their mortality, created nothing himself but mischief for his own amusement. Men were toys to him.
Such contemplative games are high drama, the inner stirrings of convalescents track the convulsions of cultures entire, as if their bony shoulder blades were shifting the weight of Atlas through their white cotton shirts, and their breath bellowed embering nations.
Thomas Mann is the kind of person who would thumb through a thousand Netflix series and watch nothing, going blind in the process.
His dilemmas are presented as the existential dramas of the inner life - what should I be, how should I live, who shall I love, who am I?
These are the themes of Modernism, the cult of the Self which drives men mad in the pursuit of their inner horizons.
These rites of reason reek of folly.
The Evil that Men Do
Thomas Mann also wrote a version of the Faust myth, showing his typical confusion of culture with an epicene agony. His evil is an illiberal antithesis to the kind of cultivated aristos who inhabited the magic mountain. Most men are not Mann, his books seem to say, as if life as a sanatorium would be better.
Thomas Mann’s idea of evil is an example of the moral narcissism of his caste. It is an inversion, being the mistaking of evil for the display of distasteful behaviours.
The evil in the legend of Faust is not entirely man-made, as it is in Mann. To exclude the Devil and his works from the devil’s bargain hunt this myth recounts is a further act of esoteric vanity: it makes the self supreme, and excludes the real presence of evil.
The version written by the monster Goethe sees Faust redeemed in the end. In this retelling, there is no pact with the Devil but a bet - that no matter how much Satan gives him he will never be satisfied.
Goethe’s Faust is a man jaded by unending choice, who recognises that the restless desires of the flesh can never lead to contentment. His reason saves him.
He who strives on and lives to strive/ Can earn redemption still
The message of the rational romancer Goethe is that persistence pays off. Faust was attracted to the piety and innocence of a young woman whose life he ruins. In part one of Goethe’s version, Faust occasions the murder of her mother, her brother and her unborn child, before abandoning her in prison.
Goethe thought it heroic for a man to exhaust himself in pursuit of the possible.
His neopagan morality is suffused with mythological fantasy. In part two, Faust explores a sort of fairyland. He has ascended beyond good and evil to a visionary state gifted only to the man of maximum experience. Goethe claims this appetite for sensation, which includes the murder of the family, is a legitimate path to heaven.
He seeks to show that the removal of restraint can lead man to salvation. There is no concern for the bodycount.
Goethe is a monster whose marriage of Reason and the Romantic made his work an elegant manifesto for absolute degradation. He writes beautifully of the reduction of man to the bestial, and celebrates his surrender to the Beast. This he champions as as the victory of Reason.
Modern Vanity as Virtue
Thomas Mann preferred to ascribe, in his 20th century Modernist way, the problem of evil to people who were not as enlightened as himself.
This vanity corrupts the natural order, placing man at the top and bottom of the hierarchy of meaning and of morality. He is sense and senselessness, science and sensuality. He is the alpha and omega.
The sickness that stalked his every page, from the angst of Tonio Kroger to the consumption of Aschenbach in Tod in Venedig is the sickness of the lost.
What breaks men, and Mann, is the weight of the world they assume upon their shoulders.
To be Devil and God, beastly and beauteous, the demands upon the man of reason to explain the world and to supply its every meaning amount to a life sentence in a desolate labour camp with no promise of release.
The work is endless, and it cannot be escaped. It breaks everyone, and it is therefore a matter of to what and to whom you will then surrender.
To the self or to what is beyond it? To Satan or to God?
This is the fundamental choice of life.
Excellent as usual. I wish I could have articulated it this well.
I was an atheist once. Then I grew up.
It's silly to pretend you have an answer to everything. The real world is a very mysterious place and there will always be things we simply can't know ... at least now. Scripture even speaks about this.
This need to pretend to be smarter than you really are or will ever be opens a Pandora's Box of Madness and tends to lead men to their own destruction. You have to know your unknowns. A real sign of higher native intelligence is a strong tolerance for ambiguity in your epistemology of known things.
This is banging, Frank!